Nvidia's GeForce Titan Z is selling online for $3,000

So, this is kind of weird. Remember that uber-expensive Titan Z graphics card Nvidia introduced in March? You know, the one with dual GK110 GPUs and a $3,000 price tag? According to Nvidia, the card is "available today from leading system builders and add-in card partners"—but good luck finding reviews of it. Nvidia evidently didn't sample the Titan Z to the press. The green team did, however, produce a promotion video to show off its new flagship.

Uh, yeah.

The press release accompanying the video is light on specifications, but separate announcements from board partners fill in the details. The Titan Z's dual GPUs have a 705MHz base frequency and an 876MHz boost clock. They're paired with 12GB of GDDR5 memory (6GB per GPU) that pushes bits at 7 GT/s.

Nvidia supplies the Titan Z's triple-slot cooler, which impressively makes do with a single fan. Most board partners seem to be sticking with the reference design, but EVGA is planning a Superclocked variant that runs at 732/915MHz and a Hydro Copper version clocked at 758/941MHz. The Hydro Copper card trades the stock cooler for a dual-slot water block designed to plug into existing liquid cooling systems. Here's a better look at the reference card:

With lower clock speeds than the GeForce 780 Ti, the Titan Z won't be able to keep up with the fastest dual-card SLI configurations—at least not in games. However, the Titan offers much better performance with double-precision math, which is important for general-purpose number crunching. This thing is ostensibly geared toward workstations rather than spare-no-expense gaming rigs.

The Titan Z's double-precison prowess may be its biggest saving grace versus AMD's dual-Hawaii Radeon R9 295 X2, which sells for a comparatively affordable $1,500. The only Titan Z review we've seen suggests the GeForce is faster than the Radeon in some games but slower in others. That review relies on FPS averages, so we still don't have a good sense of how the two compare with our latency-based metrics.

Newegg already has one Titan Z listed online: an EVGA reference design selling for $2999.99. That card is in stock, and we'll probably see others pop up before long. It will be interesting to see who, if anyone, buys them.